CHAPTER SIX
To Whom the Gods Pray
The rare man who attains wisdom is, by the very clearness of his sight, a better guide in solving practical problems than those, more commonly the leaders of men, whose eyes are misted and minds warped by ambition for success. But to give such guidance he must for the moment cease straining after the Infinite and become, in a relative sense, shortsighted. Lawrence seems hitherto to have made this adjustment. But now, one feels, he had for some months so strained himself, in conquest of his physical being, that his power of practical guidance may have been affected. Here, to some degree, if still more in the adverse conditions of the problem, may lie the explanation of what followed.
—B. H. LIDDELL HART, T. E. Lawrence
Soon after the successful raid, Lawrence returned to Aqaba sometime around September 21. His party was greeted as heroes. Lewis and Stokes were sent off to Cairo having been sorely missed by their headquarters. Allenby was pleased to throw in a medal for each to assuage their dysentery. Meanwhile, the general continued his preparations for a renewed attack against the Turkish positions around Gaza and Beersheba. The preparations had continued through the long and terribly hot summer. The scorching khamsin blew sand, dust, and flies through the camps on both sides of the line. The Turks endured more suffering because of a severe food shortage and heavy artillery bombardments from the British guns. Sandfly fever was the common, most hated scourge of all. The fever was an influenzalike disease, usually lasting three days, that laid up the patient with malaise, fever, headache, eye pain, and dehydration; the recovery period, owing to the dehydration, was often longer. The military effect was to delay and disrupt training and exercise schedules. The Turks were also impeded by the slow movement of reinforcements to the front. The raiding of Lawrence and others induced a paranoiac fear among the Ottomans as they constantly looked behind them at their vulnerable logistics rear. Two infantry divisions finally arrived in September, but these were not battle ready or battle hardened, having arrived from the temperate Caucasus front. Their German advisers, meanwhile, introduced the Turks to new techniques of fieldcraft brought with them from the western front.
Except for the heat and disease, the British had a relatively easier time of it, being able to withdraw men from the front and place them in special training camps near the cooler Mediterranean Sea. Acclimatization was an important consideration for troops arriving from the northern climes of Europe. This process could take several months and continue until well into October. British supply arrangements sought to establish certain planning norms to support the kind of mobile operations Allenby’s campaign design envisaged. Practically, this meant that his army had to find a way to operate up to a week at a time at long distances from its main base of operations. Great emphasis was therefore placed on establishing extensive storage facilities immediately behind the lines. Since the poor and nearly nonexistent roads ruled out motorized transport, Allenby had to rely heavily on water pipelines, Holt caterpillar tractors, and an old standby, the camel. Much of the logistical success was the result of the improvement of Qantara as the major supply port.
Operationally, the greatly improved logistical situation meant that Allenby’s force could attack across a much broader front and would also generate enough combat power to drive a wedge deep into the enemy’s defenses. If a decisive penetration could be achieved, a rapid cavalry exploitation could lead to the complete dislocation of the Turkish front in Palestine. The labored process of assembling such a large support base, however, meant that Allenby’s initial offensive schedule would be thrown off by several weeks. His original design had contemplated an attack in mid-September, when the weather would offer the most reasonable conditions for his troops. The complex preparations had now imposed a D-Day of sometime toward the end of October.
Allenby informed Robertson of the delay and also noted that twenty divisions would be necessary to guarantee success. Although the War Committee accepted Allenby’s decision, they were optimistic that if he could seize Jerusalem, Turkey would be knocked out of the war by Christmas. While the committee was willing to dispense optimism without accepting a commensurate measure of responsibility, it rejected his plea for fourteen additional divisions: he would have to make do with what he had. Robertson did agree to resurrect the Alexandretta operation as a deception project that would bleed forces from the front opposite Allenby. Demonstrations were made at Cyprus, but limited shipping due to U-boat losses and an active Turkish air reconnaissance effort gave the lie to the ruse.
By the end of September, the Turkish operational situation continued its downward spiral toward ruin and collapse. Initial optimism over possible operations to retake Baghdad gave way to the practical realities looming on the Palestine front as Allenby’s forces began preparations for a major offensive. A dispute arose over who would control the German troops that had just arrived in the theater. Originally, the German Asia Corps was designated the spearhead in Mesopotamia, but now the crisis facing Palestine led to a redeployment of forces. As part of the deliberations, General Falkenhayn toured the Palestine front in early September. It was his assessment that, despite reinforcement, the British were vulnerable to a spoiling attack against their eastern flank. Based on Falkenhayn’s appreciation, the Turkish high command agreed to reorganize their forces for such a strike. A serious debate arose, however, over the command of these forces. The Turks were fearful of a German seizure of strategic direction and resisted a unified commander. These debates lingered into October and were further frustrated when a huge supply base at Haidar Pasha station was sabotaged, destroying most of the ammunition for the forces reinforcing Palestine. The failure to arrive at a unified command subverted unity of effort in the face of the pending British offensive at Gaza as well as the ongoing operations north of Aqaba. A command arrangement was finally established whereby one headquarters would control forces west of the Dead Sea and south of Jerusalem and another headquarters would control troops in Syria and the Hejaz. Of course, this arrangement created a natural—and vulnerable—seam between the two commands, one that Lawrence and Allenby would soon exploit.
WHILE ALLENBY FORGED ahead with his designs on Gaza, Lawrence used the time to train raiding parties for the purpose of maintaining effective pressure on the Turks north of Aqaba. One of Lawrence’s first pupils was Captain Rosario Pisani. The artillery captain, a sometime French Lothario sent by Brémond to spy on Lawrence, quickly fell under the spell of Lawrence’s leadership. For variety’s sake, the two men took a demolition party north of Maan. They rode up out of the desert heat of Arabia into the high cold plains of the Trans-Jordan. Operating near kilometer 475, the men laid a mine consisting of a new, more powerful form of lyddite. Lyddite, named after the area in the southern United Kingdom where it was manufactured, was the common explosive used by the British since the Boer War. It was made into a molded form of picric acid and used in artillery shells as well. Struggling through the night, the party managed to lay the mine by dawn and waited.…
Lawrence waited for a long time: it took six days for a train to roll by, driven by the twice shy Turks. The empty time led to a minor leadership crisis for Lawrence: “These decisions were arrived at despite my imperfect knowledge of Arabic. The fraudulence of my business stung me. Here were more fruits, bitter fruits, of my decision, in front of Aqaba, to become a principal of the Revolt. I was raising Arabs on false pretenses, and exercising a false authority over my dupes, on little more evidence than their faces, as visible to my eyes weakly watering and stinging after a year’s exposure to the throb, throb of sunlight.… After a night it would give way to that unattractive, and not honorable, internal ache which in itself provoked thought and left its victim yet weaker to endure. In such conditions the war seemed as great a folly as my sham leadership a crime; and, sending for our sheikhs, I was about to resign myself and my pretensions into their puzzled hands.…”1 As Lawrence was struggling with the relentless burden of leader’s grief, a nearby scout
finally heralded an oncoming train.
It was a water train coming down from Maan, chugging across the mine, which failed to explode. The Arabs rejoiced, for there was no honor and little booty in such a priceless cargo. The second day, enemy patrols scuttled up and down the line like khaki beetles, though the heat of day reduced their numbers and activity, even at eight o’clock in the morning. Another victim rolled out of Maan, proclaiming its death wish with towering plumes of smoke and billowing hisses of steam. A foot patrol shepherded the iron creature at a foot’s pace, its twelve boxcars burdened with loot, the engine huffing and puffing up a steep incline. As it rolled over the bridge the mine was executed, lifting the black beast to its death amid a choking cloud of yellow ash and green suffocation. Pisani led the Arabs in a furious assault, leaving twenty Turks dead in the initial charge. The explosion knocked out the topmost arch of the bridge, and the engine was ripped open like a sardine can, the oil soaking slowly, staining the desert sand. Lawrence was examining the contents of the cargo and found the train heavily laden with seventy tons of food and sweetmeats. While he was assessing the loot, a Turkish colonel took a potshot at him, grazing Lawrence in the hip. Despite the wound, he felt great satisfaction with the success of his mission and the conduct of his men. There were no casualties, and Pisani conducted himself in an exemplary manner, showing great promise for the future. Moreover, an effective program of training was beginning to emerge. A whole entourage of dynamiters trained in the “lurens” method gained notoriety among the tribes.
Over the next four months, Lawrence’s desert sappers would destroy seventeen locomotives. The whole railroad was vulnerable: terror would travel down the rail line like lightning down a wire. His audacious raiders had boldly posted a notice on the Town Hall door in Damascus, warning that everyone traveling by rail would do so at their own peril. Because all the rolling stock was under centralized control, any losses on the Trans-Jordan front would affect the operations in Palestine. The continuous, formless raids against the terrified and disorganized Turks made Aqaba virtually invulnerable, suggesting again that an offense is the best defense. When Lawrence returned to Aqaba on October 8, he was almost immediately whisked off to Cairo to explain how the railroad operations would fit into Allenby’s grander campaign design.
A NUMBER OF new personalities graced Allenby’s growing staff. At the top reigned Allenby himself, whose “calm drive and human understanding … was the man the men worked for, the image we worshipped.” The competent Lynden-Bell had been replaced by the staunch Louis Bols, Allenby’s chief of staff when he was with the Third Army in France. Guy Dawnay came over as well. A former banker, Dawnay had studied Greek history, becoming an autodidact as strategist. He planned the battle of Suvla Bay and the two battles for Gaza. He quickly became attuned to Allenby’s needs, and the two worked together as one mind: he would deliver Jerusalem for Allenby.
Dawnay’s assessment of the situation was contrary to Allenby’s initial inclination to continue the massing of forces opposite Gaza and push scrumlike into the Turkish line. Dawnay had a different plan. He would draw the Turks into a defense in depth in front of Gaza and swing the main British strength, under the cloak of deception, around toward Beersheba, thirty-five miles to the southwest. Beersheba, along with Gaza, was one of the historical avenues into Palestine and gateway to Jerusalem. In the end, Allenby’s thrusting cavalry soul overcame his tendency to continue with the western front’s nonstrategy of attrition. But to pull off the ruse, Allenby needed to add another actor to his cast.
In Dawnay’s stable of impresarios was an ornithologist named Richard Meinertzhagen. In addition to professional bird-watching interests, he was an intelligence officer. Meinertzhagen was the joker in the pack, willing to employ deceit as readily as destruction. A man of agile and subtle intellect, he made war seem a grand game. This detached view also made him the perfect strategist. “Meiner” created a packet of forged operational maps and documents and carried them into no-man’s-land on a feigned reconnaissance mission. When he was spotted by curious pickets, he raced off toward his own lines, dropping the satchel with the fake deployments and designs and thus setting the trap. A Turkish noncom rescued the wayward pouch and brought it to headquarters for examination.
Now that Allenby had his planning team constituted at last, he wanted to better mesh Lawrence’s activities with his own. It was beginning to dawn on Lawrence that success on Allenby’s front would create great opportunity in front of the Arabs. As he examined the map, his eyes were drawn to Deraa, “the navel” of the Turkish forces in Syria. Here lay the junction of the Jerusalem-Haifa-Damascus-Medina railways. A coincident strike by Lawrence’s Arabs when Allenby’s hammer fell would have tremendous consequences for the destruction of the Turks and their German allies. Perhaps even Damascus could be grabbed in the same reach. Such an operation would be decisive only if the British could carry through, but Lawrence reckoned that British past failures in the theater and Allenby’s inexperience in the desert would count against them. The army was still in the mind-set of the western front: ponderous, oversynchronized, fearful of chaos. It tried to impose order where none was possible, failing to recognize opportunity amid disorder. In the end, it seemed better to delay the gamble until next year if it became necessary. A failed British attack would clearly leave Feisal out on a limb and vulnerable.
The necessity of weighing the consequences of the success of two masters was becoming troublesome to Lawrence. He had a duty to Allenby as an officer in His Majesty’s service, and he had a duty to Feisal and the Arabs as the leader and mainspring of the Arab Revolt. He was like a movie director having to satisfy the producers and studio moguls with an Oscar-winning production while meeting the needs of flighty rock stars heavily indulged by their union. His role was thus a synthetic and mediating one, where the circle of disagreement and disunion had to be squared. It meant he had to maintain a promontory perspective, taking in the views of both sides and balancing them on the scales of strategic merit and justice. But in the end, Lawrence recognized that Allenby, as producer, was paying the bills: “The Arab Movement lived on Allenby’s good pleasure, so it was needful to undertake some operation, less than a general revolt, in the enemy rear: an operation which could be achieved by a raiding party without involving the settled peoples; and yet one which would please him by being of material help to the British pursuit of the enemy. These conditions and qualifications pointed, upon consideration, to an attempted cutting of one of the great bridges in the Yarmuk Valley.”
THE TWO PLANS were synchronized: Allenby’s attack would begin on October 31; Lawrence would strike on November 5. The Yarmuk Valley was a very deep gorge that followed the Yarmuk River on its way to marry with the Jordan River just south of the Sea of Galilee near the town of Samakh. The railway from Palestine left Samakh and serpentined eastward toward Deraa across several bridges. The westernmost and easternmost bridges would be the most difficult to repair or rebuild, and if the strike was successful, it would isolate the entire Turkish army facing Allenby for at least two weeks. The raid would entail a 420-mile maneuver through Azrak, 50 miles due east of Amman. If everything went according to plan—always an unlikely scenario—the Turks would be trapped east of Deraa for two weeks and the Arabs might have a free ride into Damascus.
From the Arab side, the plan needed a political component if it could induce the Beni Sakhr to join in the “pickup game” approach to strategy. Sherif Nasir of Medina was momentarily out of the picture; however, Sherif Ali ibn Hussein of the Harith was available. He had a great relationship with Feisal and had developed a tactical stature that was now priceless, having led several successful train raids near El Ala. He was an incomparable desert fighter, nearly the equal of Auda himself. Ali would deliver the Harith: Lawrence could count on it. The strongest players in the game, though, were the Ruwalla, who were currently in winter quarters and inaccessible for the time being.
The plan was fairly simple: Assemble a raiding party
of about fifty men on Azrak and in two long but swift marches pounce on the westernmost Yarmuk bridge at Um Keis. The challenge was in the complexity of the demolition required to drop the rail bridges. The sapper team would consist of Lawrence; Zaal abu Tayi with a handful of Howeitat; Captain C. E. Wood, base engineer at Aqaba and recovering from a severe head shot suffered in France; and a platoon of Indian machine gunners. George Lloyd (not to be confused with the prime minister, David Lloyd George) of the Arab Bureau would tag along and offer his scintillating conversation as far as Jefer. At the last minute they were introduced to Emir Abd el Kader, who was grandson of the leader who had repulsed the French in Algeria some fifty years earlier. The grandfather had been sent into exile with his followers to the exact region of Yarmuk that Lawrence intended to strike. Abd el Kader was returning from a visit with Hussein in Mecca and was now offering the help of the exiled villagers at Yarmuk.
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